Don’t Bahrain On Our Parade

Internet access has been restricted in Bahrain leading up to and in response to the recent protests there. Both bahrainonline.org and bahrainrights.org were down prior to the start of the first planned protest. Some people are reporting they can’t access Bambuser (a video site) in the country at this time; amateur footage of the protests had reportedly been uploaded there before it was blocked. Total internet traffic in and out of Bahrain is currently 10% to 20% below normal levels, which usually only occurs during a natural disaster or a major global sporting event.

Libya is also hating on the internet. For the past few days the internet there has been completely locked down at 11:00 PM GMT each night and not partially restored until 5:30 AM GMT the next morning. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Aljazeera continue to be entirely blocked there. Some are worried that the internet blocking would affect bit.ly links worldwide on twitter and elsewhere. Those people are called “nerds”. Nonetheless, the CEO of bit.ly, John Borthwick, posted on Quora that three of their five root servers are not in Libya, so service will continue as usual. Continue the usual Rick rolling.

One more story about the big guys telling the little guys they can’t have their internet: a nun in a secluded convent in Toledo, Spain has been asked to leave the convent after 35 years of service on the grounds that she used Facebook too much. Sister María Jesús Galán had 600 Facebook friends and earned a local government award in 2008 for digitizing backups of several prized texts in the convent’s library. She has moved in with her mother and told her Facebook friends she would like to visit London and New York. This isn’t the first internet-related scandal for the Catholic Church in Toledo, Spain. Last year, a priest there was kicked out for posting a picture of himself in his underwear online, advertising himself as a male prostitute for “women and couples” while bragging about his “well hung 15 cm” (5.9″) penis, and stealing €17,000 (US $23,263) from the church to buy prostitutes, phone sex, and pornography. We’ve nicknamed him “Saint Uproxx”.

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Internet restricted by the government in Bahrain to undermine protests. (Mashable, picture via BoingBoing.)

Libyan government now blocking internet access at night. Some sites return to usability in the daytime while others remain completely blocked. (TheNextWeb)

The newest bassist for Smashing Pumpkins, Nicole Fiorentino, revealed she’s one of the two girls on the cover of the “Siamese Dream” album, released years before she joined the band. She waited till after she had the job to mention it. (TheDailyWhat)

In an anonymous survey of 162 psychotherapists in the US, 21 of them (13%) reported at least one patient had confessed “that they’d murdered someone, but never been found out”, while 103 (63%) have had at least one patient “disclose having committed an act of previously unreported sexual assault”. Either people really like lying to therapists and/or psychiatrists love lying to researchers, or we need to stay far away from psychiatry clinic parking lots. (BritishPsychologicalSociety)

Belgium set a new record in recent history for going without a government for the last 249 days, and this article contains the greatest quote of the week, “Students took to the streets, with the promise of free beer and chips, and dozens stripped to their underwear.” Sounds like our kind of non-government. (BBC)

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The Economist put together this chart comparing the average age of a country’s population to the age of their leader. Ha, old people are old. [Picture via Buzzfeed]

This infographic shows countries that may be poised for unrest on the basis of their high unemployment rates, young population, and high urbanization rates. (InnovationNewsDaily)

And here’s an interactive widget about the same topic but some different countries. Widgety. (Guardian)